…I’m getting really, really, really tired of the Huffington Post and its misleading, hype-drenched headlines.
By “headlines,” I mean the text of links that appear along with a thumbnail photo on HuffPo’s front page, or on one of its main topic pages, and point to the actual story. In many cases, the title that appears above the actual story text is fine, but the “headline” link text implies that the story is bigger, juicier, or more consequential — often much more so — than it really is. The president has even mentioned this tendency in passing in recent weeks.
And speaking of the president, the example that has me griping about this again, even after the Jennifer Carroll story I’ve written about yesterday and earlier today, is this headline on the HuffPost Politics front page: “Obama Booed for Big Fail.”
”Big fail”? What could that mean? A major political gaffe on the campaign trail? Some inadvertent insult to an audience (or perhaps an advertent one, like Mitt Romney’s apparently deliberate diss of the NAACP last week)? An international-incident-provoking diplomatic blunder?
Nope. The president’s “big fail” was failing to realize that the “Kiss Cam” was trained on him and the First Lady while they watched the USA Basketball men’s/women’s Olympic prep doubleheader against Brazil last night at the Verizon Center in Washington, DC. Not realizing the Kiss Cam was showing them (or perhaps not being familiar with the Kiss Cam concept, since I don’t imagine they have time to get to lots of games), the First Couple… didn’t kiss. And the crowd apparently booed… but given that the same crowd had given the president’s entourage (which included the vice president and the president’s personal aide Reggie Love, in addition to the First Lady) “loud cheers” when they first arrived, I’m guessing the boos were more along the lines of good-natured teasing than serious disapproval. After Sasha and Malia Obama clued their parents in at halftime, they got another shot at the public smooch, and this time they apparently stuck the dismount.
It’s a cute little human interest story about the president showing up to support our Olympic teams, but “big fail”? Eh, not so much.
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